by Roman Kudryashov
... in which the author tries to understand why we judge politicians based on broken economic theories.

Downtime

by Athens Naum
It took Lola almost exactly 15 minutes after the TIN roof came down to find a newsstand in New York City. The whole time, she was laughing: "Total Information Network, my ass."

Some Like It in the Port

by Syndey Bernstein
A woman walks into a bar. She is obviously upset.

Before the Storm...

by Athens Naum
Jackie Gerwin sat in the dark before the morning, thinking about the weather. He had long stopped paying attention to the dim screen, predicting a dim wind, dim profits next year, a dim lawsuit. He was simply looking outside, waiting for the sun to rise, but it wasn't coming out from behind the heavy clouded sky.

ORE: Obsessive Research Engine

The ORE is a new system for collecting, organising, and searching information. Read our lab's white + black papers on this project in early April, 2014, and track the development.

Game of Theory

Game of Theory is a linguistic game, combining futurism, story-telling, and analytic examination of not-yet-real concepts. Posts are crosslisted at gameoftheory.tumblr.com

The World Can Be

The World Can Be is a series of short interviews with academics, writers, designers, and anyone with something interested to say about what they think the future could be like (or will be like), and how they came up with that.

...While spacejunk occasionally falls out of the sky (and usually burns up on re-entry), the majority of orbital debris ends up floating together and creating artificial clouds far above the earth. Estimates suggest that the layer of debris extends up to 10 miles around the earth, exposing any space launches and orbiting stations to floating hazards. Less so ‘geologic,’ this anthropocene-created mass nevertheless acts as a slow or none-decomposing marker of our time on the planet.

If you find yourself in the unfortunate situation of sitting in a living room as the Israeli soldiers next door use explosives to make a gaping hole in the wall, you’ll be forgiven for not immediately realizing your new status as postwar French philosophy’s latest victim. Yet, strangely enough, that is exactly what you would be.

One day, Betsy Sparrow, a cognitive psychologist at Columbia University, caught herself consulting Google to find the name of an actress in Gaslight, a black and white film that she’d seen countless times. In true form for an experimental psychologist, Sparrow took her experience into the lab. And so, four years and many experimental trials later, Sparrow published a paper exploring the “Google effect.”

If you ask me to describe What Are These Ideas, I can't do much better than to say it is a "project." It's ever evolving. It's a work in progress.

Ultimately, my goal is to explore the world of ideas, with whatever tools possible. Sometimes, this means writing essays; other times, this means writing fiction. Still other times, this means creating public events and coding programs, launching art projects, and exploring archival materials.

In a way, What Are These Ideas is also a challenge to 21st century media production. At heart, this is a modern magazine. However, I think a modern magazine can be more than just words + pictures. Instead of thinking of a magazine in terms of a print legacy product, I want to incoporate the functions of a school lab, the research and direction of a think tank, and the go-out-and-do-it spirit of a start-up with the design, strategy, and editorial vision of a forward-looking magazine.